Good bombing.

The BBC is excelling itself in recent days in what can only be called utter shite.

The crisis erupted late on 7 August when Georgian forces bombarded South Ossetia to restore Tbilisi’s control over the region. – Source

How about this…

Georgian forces initiated shelling of civillians and Russian peacekeepers in the province of South Ossetia, which in late 2006 saw over 90% of its population vote for independence from Georgia. The Georgian shelling took place just hours after Georgia agreed to a ceasefire with Russia after previous confrontations.

But oh no. Georgian bombing is good, Russian repsonses are bad.

Oh those bad bad Russians.

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When your bubble is bursting what do you do?

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You make a bigger superbubble to contain the burst. That’s what.

The 1 year old credit crunch.
(Yes it was officially 1 year old as of a few days ago. It must be true, the BBC said so!)

I wouldn’t elevate myself to the status of a recognised economist, and my opinion on economics has been called naieve before and yes, nobody would invite me onto the corporate media to say things like ‘the market is rising becasue of xyz’ when the market is actually rising, and when the market falls to be invited back on to say ‘this was bound to happen becasue of pqr’. – You know the score.

But I do a fair bit of reading about it and I’m personally happy with my handle on it. There isn’t anything magical about looking at economics, nor my view of it. It’s just exploitation to maximise what you can potentially squeeze out of someone. That is, that I call ‘innocent’ economics. But it’s time to say bye bye wee boy as we move on up to the mother of modern economics, the significant bit, involving speculators and global manipulators of the market. It is this which forms the super bubble that enveloped the standard bubble of mini-scams of the past.

At the time the credit was beginning to crunch, I denounced it as a scam. If it was genuine, my proposed simple solution would have cured it in a matter of weeks – that of mortgague default negotiation. Tell banks and building societies to restructure their customers loans so they would keep their houses. It was really that simple. However, no such restructuring took place.

Another indication of the scam was the MSM saying it lobbox like there is no cheap/available credit left anymore. The BBC says the credit crunch is “Defined as a severe shortage of money or credit” Clearly, whoever dreamed up that bit of tripe, doesn’t really know the first thing about money and economics, yet the MSM kept repeating it verbatum. No MSM outlet has ever properly explained why, if cheap credit no longer existed (LOL) did interest rates drop?

UK (Bank of England base rates):
Aug 08  5.00 %
Jul 08  5.00 %
Jun 08  5.00 %
May 08  5.00 %
Apr 08  5.00 %
Mar 08  5.25 %
Feb 08  5.25 %
Jan 08  5.50 %
 —
Dec 07  5.50 %
Nov 07  5.75 %
Oct 07  5.75 %
Sep 07  5.75 %
Aug 07  5.75 %  (The credit crunch is born)
source: http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/graphs-base-rate-uk.php

And what of our friends in the US???

So, cheap credit no longer exists becasue the interest rate dropped. Marvellous, isn’ tit? Surely we will look back on this period of history and describe it as a golden age. A golden age of MSM garbage.

But in actual reality, it’s doubtful that allowing people a little grace to repay the loans on their house would have solved the problem. Becuase despite the media lies, the housing loans market was pretty much irrelevant. It is a bit fishy when the BBC says “After a two year period between 2004 and 2006 when US interest rates rose from 1% to 5.35%, the US housing market begins to suffer, with prices falling and a rise in homeowners defaulting on their mortgages.” Or maybe it isn’t fishy and it’s just that the BBC jouno who wrote that statement didn’t seem to think this relevent “The median household income was $46,326 in 2005, a gain – above inflation – of 1.1 percent from 2004.”

Hummm… another spanner in the works.

The crunch came about becasue the phoney highly intertwined bets and packages wrapped around mortgages, oil and the predicted price of candy floss at Whitley Bay. This multilayered intertwinded wrapping far outsripped the value of the underlying asset.

It’s not unreasonable then to suggest, that someone with the power to change an indicator value, and someone who realises which way the bets are stacked in relation to the value of things like mortguage packages or candy floss, could make an absolute fortune if he were able to manipulate the value an underlying asset. This is essentially insider trading. Conventional insider trading is pretty much regulated and checked for (unless it related to the value of United Airlines stock of the value of the pound sterlling on 9-11 and 7-7 respectively). But derivative trading ISN’T regulated.

So, bump up the interest rate, watch the value of sub-prime mortguage packages go down as fears of non repayment manefest, and boom, you’re laughing all the way to the bank.

Perception is one hell of a strong force in the gambling pits of the LSE and Wall St., so make a small number of people lose their homes, get your buddies in the MSM to say it’s a catastrophe and that the world is gonna end and you’ve generated the necessary fear to collapse the sub-prime value.

Lobbox? Well why did it take almost a year for Bush to sign a “housing(repayment relief law“? Why did the US and UK govt not regulate the derivatives trade? Why did the cost of credit fall for the duration of the credit crunch? Why is the BBC wrong about people less able to afford to pay for their homes when the median value of household income rose? Why did the UK Govt bail out a private bank that gambled and lost. And more importantly where has all the money been lost to?

Yes it is fake money, but in a fake system, it acts as real money.

To end with, the BBC isn’t totally crap, just maybe 99% crap. Here’s a part of the 1% that isn’t… Credit crunch: The blame game

 

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BBC’s China crisis

BBC journo hacks having blogs is truely a stupid idea, although I must admit, Mr. Prestons are quite intersting.

So the anti-China newz goes on. This time about another non-issue of some girl faking singing and some fireworks. Yeah, I know… zzz

Never mind the fact that Evo Morales has won a powerful victory to stop the US backed wealthy elite from ripping up Bolivia, or the likely dirty operations that will probably follow like when the US backed plotters and murderers kidnapped Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. No. Lets not have discussion and analysis of that, I mean come on, there is far more important things to do like another rund of China bashing.

We get the BBC’s James Reynolds on his ‘blog’ going about how his resistance to talk about this non-issue has finally been breached. Oh the pain! And what does every blog have? comments…

Here’s what the comments currently look like at James’s blog…

Finally after more than 7 hours of holding comments about James unleashing his conscience (lol) in among the censored comments (and they have the sputum to criticise Chinese censorship) we get a few gems…

 11. At 00:59am on 13 Aug 2008, TaiyuanRen wrote:
James, oh poor James, No wonder everybody complained you know nothing about China!
Why a faked Beijing Olympic girl surprised you? We faked infant milk powders, fertilizers, eggs, meat, IC chips, computers, CD’s, DVD’s, news, Master and Ph’D degrees, moon photos, histories, sports matches, and anything you can think of.
You think we can not fake an Olympic? Give me a break!

16. At 01:24am on 13 Aug 2008, BobInDallasTX wrote:
So what? Do you think the girls in Las Vegas are just locals? Do you really believe that “standards” don’t exist everywhere?
How many ugly people do you see on TV? Selling products?
China is selling China and doing a beautiful job of it.

13. At 01:23am on 13 Aug 2008, IanLarge wrote:
It seems only journalists are really upset about this -…

Note: One comment that wasn’t in breach of the “BBC censorship rules” was an utterly irrelevent post going on about China and it’s restrictions of adoption. Clearly no breach of rules there.

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BBC Blogs. Doesn’t the BBC have enough crap already? What can the corporate journo do in a blog that he doesn’t do in this ‘reports’?

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Citizen Journalism

Update (11/Oct/08): This program is now available (mp4 format) from Al Jazeera’s website.
Click here for the mp4 file (87.0 Mb). End of update.

 

Al Jazeera (English) features a rather good program called “The Listening Post“. It often reports on the darker side of journalism, such as the media censorship in Egypt or Russia and so on. It also commonly reports on the poo that trickles out of FOX news (forgive the oxymoron). The Listening Post is very much net centred, reporting on the interesting slant or scoop bloggers occasionally come up with and encourages otherwise unknown (but informed opinion) on a number of relevant topics.

It was with some surprise then that about a week and a half ago, it specifically covered what it called ‘citizen journalism’ and that report seemed to downplay and undermine it.

My personal pov is that the mainstream media (MSM) {read: ‘corporate media’} and mainstream journalists have utterly failed to live up to their responsibilities. I believe the MSM should almost never let the word of governments and corporations go unchallenged. It should also tell the stories of individuals as they amble their way through life. I don’t mean as in “Regional newzzz) “, but stories of people affected by big or meaningful events. Such output from the MSM and establishment journalists is as rare as an intelligent front bencher. {Ed: Well ok, maybe not that rare.}

And this is where citizen journalism comes into play. It is helping to fill some of the void created by the MSM. The vast majority of citizens journalists whether they use blogs or news hubs like spidered news, Information Clearing House, Huffington Post, Indymedia etc, adopt a stance that is critical of the establishment, be it the fascist regime of Washington or Democratically elected Hamas of occupied Palestine.

Sure citizen journalists are subject to their own bias, but IMO, it is of such a low degree that it simply isn’t an issue. Those that displaying significant bias usually make no attempt to hide it, not least in part because they simply don’t have to. They want to get their voice out there. They don’t need to rely on corporate subversion funding. When big money sniffs around the web, the result is usually negative. The amount of citizen journalism these days also provides a modicum of checks and balances to citizen based news and any BBC like journo-junk can easily assessed.

Not only is the establishment media brought into disrepute because of economics, but also due to its panderance to the political affiliations of its owner and it’s editors. A citizen journalist doesn’t face financial severance or career limbo should his view and actions relating to world news not agree with the mainstream line.

Therefore, The Listening Post got my goat slightly when it featured those within the MSM trying to pull down the significance, integrity and reportage importance of the citizen. One of them said wtteo: ‘citizen journalists don’t have the filter for quality that the mainstream do’ which really, was a laughable statement.

It’s not all doom and gloom in the MSM. There is the occasional gem (albeit a cubic zirconia) and some critique however tepid does make it through and is welcome. But but for the importance the MSM self-elevates itself to, it’s really is a dematerialising illusory projection.

So journo citz of the world, keep it up! I hope you increase your wonderful efforts.

The mergence of the media/politics and finance ultimately has only one winner and its certainly not us. Don’t give the bastards free reign.

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Gizbert pic (and interview) www.journalism.co.uk/news/story3323.shtml

Stephen Cole pic: BBC

Old AJE info. I didn’t know David Marash  was Jewish.. all the better :)

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